In addition to the many industry leading companies who have endorsed IBM's recently released technical briefs, describing an Open Datacenter with an Interoperable Network (ODIN), the first academic endorsement of ODIN has recently come from Marist College (Go Red Foxes !). In their endorsement, Marist notes that their support of ODIN was part of their broader efforts to insure that the next generation of technology students are prepared for the challenges which await them. Marist also cited their related work with the National Science Foundation funded lab for enterprise computing, their network interoperability lab, and their cloud computing computational resources. Also commenting on ODIN as part of their Twitter feed were IBM Vice President Ross Mauri (a member of the Marist Board of Directors) and Marist Vice President and Chief Information Officer Bill Thirsk. I'm sure there will be opportunities for IBM and other ODIN supporters to work with colleges such as Marist on research and interoperability that will benefit the open design principles set forth in the ODIN documents.

I’m pleased to report that Juniper Networks has publicly endorsed the open data center interoperable network (ODIN) approach to designing data center networks. If you've been following this blog, then you know that on May 8, IBM released a set of technical briefs describing ODIN during the InterOp conference in Las Vegas. This approach to using industry standards as the preferred means to designing data center networks has been supported by Juniper, as discussed in this blog post from Liz King, Vice-President of Global Alliances. Many thanks to Juniper for their support of open networking standards; I’m sure we’ll have more to say about how these solutions should be designed in the near future.

In Part I of this post, we looked more closely at the networking under the covers of an IBM PureScale system. We found that a reasonably configured PureSystems solution could comfortably support a whole lot of VMs in the space of only a few racks (no, I’m not going to repeat the numbers here; check out my last post for more details). I also promised to explain why networking would drive the next big innovations on this platform.

This dense packing of compute power is exactly why the network will be so important to the future of this system. Before PureSystems, large amounts of servers and storage would have to be spread out across the data center; network latency and physical distance would ultimately limit performance. Now that multi-core processors, advanced storage technology, and other features have made it possible to fit this much processing power into a few racks, we can take full advantage of Ethernet running up to 40 Gbit/s and Fibre Channel running up to 16 Gbit/s to realize very high bandwidth and low latency over short distances.

Now, imagine what happens in a few years as these trends continue. When the network can run 100 Gbit/second or faster, it becomes the highest speed interconnect on the platform. We’ll be able to interconnect more processors (each of which will also be more powerful than they are today and will host more VMs), with negligible performance impact due to the network. Multi-processor systems on the order of several thousand physical processors could become economically viable for many users, not just the most advanced applications.

At the same time, storage is integral to PureSystems, not a separate add-on from another company. In the future, server to storage access technologies previously reserved only for high performance computing can begin to trickle down into more commercial integrated platforms. And future integrated systems, enabled by the network, could then reach levels of parallelism and performance far beyond what we know today; think of how video games have brought the equivalent of a graphic supercomputer into your living room at very low cost. With latency between servers and storage becoming a non-issue, these systems would be ideal for processing the type of gigantic data sets which are showing up in financial, health care, retail, transportation, and a host of other fields. All of this stems from the PureSystems being rolled out now, so you get not only the immediate benefits of this platform but a path forward into even more powerful computing applications as time goes on.

Of course, when this happens everyone will marvel at the incredible advances in multi-core processors, multi-thread software, and other fields. But let’s not forget the standards-based, high bandwidth, physical and virtual networks under the covers of these systems that will quietly be doing their part to revolutionize computing, yet again.

What do you think the future of networks, or video games for that matter? Share your comments below, or respond to my Twitter feed

Every few years, IBM announces some major innovation in the way computers are designed, used or deployed. You might remember the transition from CMOS to BiCMOS mainframes, copper-doped ASICs, or open source Linux for the enterprise. Each of these represented a major shift in the way we think about and use computational power to accomplish a huge variety of tasks. Recently, IBM announced its latest innovation, the PureSystems platform of integrated servers, storage and networking.

By now, you’ve probably seen at least some information about how PureSystems accelerates cloud deployments, simplifies the data center, and consolidates computing resources. But, I’m a networking guy, so my view of the world is a bit different. Much like the famous view of the world as seen from New York City , when I look at PureSystems, I see a lot of advanced servers, storage, and software hanging off the true technological marvel – the integrated data center network.

At the risk of appearing a bit single-minded, I’d like to talk about one of the unsung heroes of the PureSystems revolution, namely the networking technology that ties PureSystems together. And then I’d like to point out that not only is the network a key part of PureSystems, it’s got the potential to drive the next series of big innovations on this platform, and maybe even across the computing industry.

Let’s start with a quick review of the PureSystems network.

First, it’s designed for flexibility; you can choose a combination of networking protocols, including Fibre Channel (up to 16 Gbit/second), Ethernet (10 to 40 Gbit/second), or InfiniBand (QDR and FDR data rates). You can plug up to four switches into a PureSystems chassis, and link multiple chassis together using the 10, 40 or 10/40GbE IBM System Networking RackSwitch top of rack (TOR) switches. This lets you scale PureSystems from a single chassis, up through multi-rack systems (where a rack can hold up to 4 chassis).

PureSystems also supports a virtual Ethernet switch running in the hypervisor, the IBM Distributed Switch 5000v. IBM’s virtual switches, blade switches, and TORs all support industry standards including switch-resident IBM VMready with IEEE 802.1Qbg to enable VM migration (either between VMs on the same physical server, or across multiple physical servers).

And, this platform makes really good use of server virtualization; each chassis can hold up to 14 half-wide blade servers or 7 full-wide blade servers, running your choice of workloads on Linux, Windows, or AIX. Yes, I said AIX…you can plug either IBM Power microprocessor blades or Intel x86 blades into a PureSystems chassis. With around 160 servers in a 4 rack system, even a moderately virtualized system can fit over 1,600 VMs quite comfortably. That’s a tremendous amount of compute power in a relatively small package, and it comes pre-integrated with a single system manager that lets you manage all the physical and virtual resources in the system (without any third party tools).

Now that we know a bit about the networking technology inside PureSystems, why should we get excited about it ? Tune in to Part II of my blog to find out! Meanwhile, let me know what you think about the importance of networking for integrated systems by commenting on my blog, or through my Twitter feed.

During a webinar presented at InterOp 2012 describing how to prepare your infrastructure for the cloud using open standards, Huawei has indicated their support for the Open Datacenter Interoperable Network (ODIN) approach. Huawei joins a growing number of companies who recognize that the best path forward for next generation data centers lies in the use of open industry standards and protocols. You can read more about the importance of open standards and ODIN in my earlier blog posts or through my Twitter feed. Stay tuned for the latest news from InterOp and the world of data center networking !

As noted in a recent post on this blog, Huawei had included a mention of the Open Datacenter Interoperable Network (ODIN) in their InterOp Webinar on open standards for cloud networking. In addition, Huawei has now posted a more detailed endorsement of ODIN on their blog site. According to this site, " ODIN addresses best practices and interpretations of networking standards that are vital to efficient data center operation". For those of you who haven't reviewed the ODIN materials yet, they include a description of the transformation taking place in modern data center networks and how to best address these issues using open industry standards. Keep watching this space for more news on ODIN and other data center networking issues.

This past week, I was honored to be invited to present the 2013 Mark Luchinsky Memorial Lecture at Penn State, and to meet with some of the faculty and students, including the Schreyer Honors College. This talk was presented as part of the lead-up for the 2014 Shaping the Future Summit. I enjoyed the opportunity to talk with students about technology issues, and since we didn’t have time to take everyone’s questions during the event, I’d like to use this blog to respond to several questions that came in through Twitter during & after the lecture.

Question: “When it comes to ethics in innovation, how do you balance when something created for good can be used for evil ? “

I see you’ve been reading Google’s list of 10 things they know are true (not doing evil comes in at number 6). While I personally like their technologist version of the Hippocratic Oath for engineers (first, do no harm), there are often large gray areas in practice (for example, should Google refrain from deploying their technology in nations which censor the Internet as a protest against that activity, or should they engage in these nations and try to improve things from within the system?). These are not easy questions. For some techniques on dealing with gray area thinking, I’d recommend the Presidential Leadership Academy at Penn State; I had the opportunity to meet with these students during my recent visit, and was quite impressed by their level of engagement and understanding. As a technologist, we have an ethical responsibility towards the technologies which we help create and deploy. However, often we can’t foresee exactly how a given technology will be used, or misused, in practice (there’s a famous story that AT&T originally didn’t want to file a patent application on the laser, because they couldn’t understand what it had to do with telephones). I’d encourage you to always act according to your values, and I try to approach my leadership role in the same way. For more on values-based leadership, you might consider the book “Leadership in my rear view mirror” by former IBMer Jack Beach.

Question: “ If technology is so important, why isn’t there a bigger push for it in grade school ? “

In some places, there is a big push (particularly in countries outside the U.S.). In many other places, more needs to be done in order to update the curriculum and reflect the recent, growing importance of technology (for example, some states have firm requirements for high school graduation in subjects such as health education and gym, but no requirements for basic technical literacy). There are many reasons for this. Technology advances much faster than most elementary and middle schools can keep up. Changing the curriculum statewide requires significant effort (though programs like IBM’s sponsorship of P-TECH are making a good start, as recognized recently by President Obama). There are always financial, political, and other barriers to overcome in the real world. There are many schools experimenting with a broader STEM education curriculum, and international FIRST Lego League is part of that effort. There is also a growing recognition that the rules of higher education are changing as well, including recent efforts to develop very large online classes (MOOCs) delivered at very low cost. I think it’s important to provide students with an understanding of technology as a life skill. Even if they don’t plan to become engineers when they grow up, they will still need to vote on issues affected by technology, science, and math, including whether to believe the statistics from the latest election polls, whether they want to eat meat that’s been irradiated as a preservative, or whether we should invest more in manned or unmanned space exploration.

Question: “ What role does disaster recovery play in modern data centers ? “

There’s a lot of interest in disaster recovery, following the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent array of natural and man-made disasters which have threatened major global data centers. I work on enterprise-class disaster recovery for Fortune 500 clients using IBM’s System Z platform, and I developed our qualification program for optical networking companies who want to have their solutions tested under these demanding conditions. Although most companies recognize the need for both disaster backup and business continuity, sometimes we need to be reminded of the business impacts which can result if these solutions are neglected or not tested and updated frequently. Large data centers need to carefully consider how much data they can afford to lose, how fast they need key functions to come back online after a disaster, and other factors so they can appropriately size their recovery strategy. I’m currently working on ways to use software defined networking (SDN) to rapidly re-provision long distance optical networks from wireless mobile controllers (such as a smart phone), so that you can move critical data around while you’re evacuating from a disaster site. We have a demo of this running at the SDN Innovation Lab in the NY State Center for Cloud Computing & Analytics, Marist College, NY, for those who are interested. You can also read more about disaster recovery in the latest edition of my book (insert shameless self-interested plug here), the Handbook of Fiber Optic Data Communication (4th edition, Elsevier/Academic Press).

It’s always a pleasure to talk with students about the future of technology. If you’d like to continue the conversation, drop me a line on Twitter @Dr_Casimer

This past month, a lot of people have been asking me to comment on the rumors swirling around a possible IBM open source initiative for software-defined networking (SDN) called Daylight. And I mean a LOT of people, from the audience at the OFC/NFOEC conference, to the Wall Street banks who attended my talk at the Open Network Exchange in Manhattan, to my fellow networking engineers who participated in the online roundtable from the MPLS/Ethernet World Congress. Since I usually enjoy a good technical discussion, it’s been more than a bit frustrating that I couldn’t respond to these rumors directly before now. Waiting for the official announcement of this initiative was made even harder when I read some of the preliminary online speculation about Daylight that was either misinformed, misguided, or just plain wrong.

In any case, it was a tremendous relief for me when The Linux Foundation (the industry’s leading nonprofit organization dedicated to open source development) announced OpenDaylight this morning. So for everyone who’s been waiting along with me, let’s take this opportunity to clear the air about what OpenDaylight actually means for the data networking industry.

As I mentioned in my recent tutorial at OFC/NFOEC, major industry trends such as warehouse scale data centers, big data analytics, and cloud computing in the enterprise are driving companies to revisit their data center network designs. SDN has the potential to lower capital and operating expenses, increase efficiencies, and provide faster time to value in this rapidly changing environment. But in order to fully realize the potential value of SDN, as quickly as possible, we need to go beyond the product line of any one networking company. We need to create a development community that encourages rapid innovation from a broad range of stake holders serving a common goal. In short, we need to do for networking what Linux did for server operating systems.

OpenDaylight is an open source framework intended to accelerate adoption of Software Defined Networking and to create an open, transparent approach to SDN development. Just as the Linux community created a viable open source operating system, which matured until it was deployed on enterprise-class systems and mainframes, OpenDaylight will create programmable SDN abstractions for many different types of data networks. Much of the initial code will be contributed and supported by industry leading companies who have signed up as either Platinum or Gold members of the OpenDaylight project. I feel this is one of the strongest features of the project; OpenDaylight is not owned by any one company, although many industry leaders have committed both developers and funding to the effort. Besides IBM, founding members include BigSwitch Networks, Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Ericsson, Juniper, Microsoft, NEC, Red Hat, and VMWare; other contributors include Arista, Fujitsu, Alcatel-Lucent, Intel, Dell, Hewlett Packard, Nuage, and Plumgrid. I’ve been working with many other IBMers for the past few months, talking with these companies and crafting a common perspective for the SDN open source community. You’ll note that a number of these companies had previously publicly endorsed IBM’s point of view regarding open networking standards (the Open Datacenter Interoperable Network, or ODIN). One of the five initial ODIN volumes deals with SDN and its implications for the data center; by definition, supporting OpenDaylight means supporting open networking standards, so it’s nice to see other companies joining this commitment to interoperable SDN networks.

This project is good news for anyone who’s been trying to implement the recent Gartner Group study, which effectively said that corporations who didn’t pursue a multi-vendor networking strategy were paying 15-25% more than necessary for their network, and thus failing to meet their fiduciary responsibilities. But SDN is about much more than just reducing your network operating expenses; it’s also a driving force for new applications and potentially new revenue streams. As I’ve said in my blog on many occasions, open standards and open source software are an excellent way to foster innovation. By supporting OpenFlow and other standards, OpenDaylight allows a global development community to innovate at the speed of software, just as we’ve seen for smart phones or tablet computers.

The first code from the OpenDaylight Project is expected to be available in 3Q this year, and will include an open controller, virtual overlay network, protocol plug-ins, and switch device enhancements. The code is independent of the network operating system, and is governed by best practices such as the Eclipse Public License (EPL) commonly used for Java. Just as in any open source community, companies are free to participate based on the merit of their contributions. For example, IBM plans to contribute an open source version of its Distributed Overlay Virtual Ethernet (DOVE) technology, which has been working its way through the IETF standards bodies for some time now. DOVE software runs on top of the existing network hardware infrastructure and virtualizes layer 2 and 3 network properties. This makes it possible to set up, manage, and scale virtual networks much faster than ever before. Some possible applications of DOVE include merging multiple data networks together (for example, when one company acquires another) or allowing highly virtualized servers to connect with merchant silicon switches (by abstracting the IP and MAC address tables).

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating…it's a very cool time to be a networking engineer. I’m excited by the potential of OpenDaylight for cloud computing and other applications, and I’m looking forward to working with the global development community on bringing all the benefits of Linux and server virtualization to the data center network.

Still not sure how you feel about open source networking? Now that I can talk freely about OpenDaylight, drop me a line on Twitter @Dr_Casimer

The list of companies endorsing IBM's recently announced Open Datacenter with an Interoperable Network (ODIN) continues to grow. Ciena is the most recent company to endorse ODIN, as noted in their blog post from their CTO and Senior Vice-President, Products and Technology, Steve Alexander. In this post, Ciena says that ODIN "looks to be a nearly ideal approach to allow the connect, compute, and store resources to be virtualized and operationally united for simplicity and scale". In fact, the use of industry standards to enable more tightly integrated solutions has been recently demonstrated in IBM's PureSystems offerings, which were announced on April 11; you can read more about PureSystems in my earlier blog posts. I'm very pleased that Ciena has endorsed the ODIN approach, and I'm sure we'll see more examples of this design approach in the coming months. Remember, let me know what you think about ODIN by commenting on this blog, or on my Twitter feed, and keep watching this site for the latest data center networking news.

I’m pleased to report that BTI has become the latest company
to publicly endorse the Open Datacenter Interoperable Network (ODIN) approach
to designing data center networks. As regular readers of my blog know, IBM has released
a set of technical briefs describing ODIN, which provides an approach to using
open industry standards to create next generation data center networks.I’ve written, podcasted, and been interviewed
many times about ODIN, all of which is linked from my blog.This approach to using industry standards as
the preferred means to designing data center networks has been endorsed in this post from Chandra Pandey, Vice-President of Platform Solutions at BTI. Many thanks for this support of open
networking standards; I’m sure we’ll have more to say about how to create these
solutions with IBM and BTI technology in the near future.

I’m pleased to report that Brocade has publicly endorsed the open data center interoperable network (ODIN) approach to designing data center networks. On May 8, IBM released a set of technical briefs describing ODIN during the InterOp conference in Las Vegas. This approach to using industry standards as the preferred means to designing data center networks is discussed further in Brocade's blog. Many thanks to Brocade for their support of open networking standards; I’m sure we’ll have more to say about how to build these solutions in the near future.

Following the recent release of the Open Datacenter Interoperable Network (ODIN) technical briefs at InterOp 2012, several companies have publicly pledged their support for the ODIN approach to open standards. Most recently, BigSwitch Networks has posted to their blog with a nice summary of recent open standards activities at InterOp, including their endorsement of the ODIN technical briefs. IBM deeply appreciates this show of support for open standards in the data center network, including the full breadth of software defined networking (SDN) approaches (both overlay networks and OpenFlow). IBM has demonstrated the industry's first 40G OpenFlow enabled switch, and continues to drive strong innovation in SDN and other aspects of the ODIN design approach. Keep watching this blog for more news on ODIN and InterOp 2012, or follow my Twitter feed.

Following IBM's announcement this past week at InterOp, there has been a surge of interest in the recently proposed Open Datacenter Interoperable Network (ODIN) technical briefs. I'm pleased to report that Adva Optical Networking, a leading wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) company specializing in WAN transport, has endorsed the ODIN approach on their blog. There's never been a better opportunity for cloud data centers to get in on the ground floor by designing their next generation networks around the best practices and open industry standards referenced in ODIN. We appreciate Adva's support of this direction, and look forward to working with leading industry networking companies to implement the ODIN design recommendations in modern data center networks.